Excellent. Misoponos would love your catastrophizing!
Plato hated Aristophanes and painted him as a fool in Symposium—drunk off his rocker and spouting ridiculous "myths" to avoid real arguments and discussion. Plato was skewering Aristophanes to highlight the absurdity of superficial mimesis as a cheap substitute for reason and explanation.
Prof. Peterson does not like to discuss primary literature* in his class, presumably because it encourages students to wrestle with difficult material themselves without the careful curation and filtering by the priestly Professor. In this case, a few select quotes are lifted from Plato's caricature of Aristophanes in order to disingenuously paint Plato as a "gender ideology" compatriot.
Texas A&M fell for Peterson's trap, ordering him not to intentionally and superficially distort Plato to further a political agenda. The dishonest press OF COURSE would add their own distortions in the form of catastrophizing exaggerations: "Texas A&M Bans Plato" or "the thing being treated as contraband here is Plato’s Symposium."
No. Plato is not being banned, nor is Symposium. Instead, the target is a sloppy and disingenuous use of completely out-of-context excerpt to twist Plato into some kind of "gender ideology" trailblazer and advocate. Sure, Texas A&M's "ban" on teaching "gender ideology" probably crosses the line into idiotic, but a response that bends the knee to Misoponos by catastrophizing the episode into a black and white battle between the Good People and the Evil People also borders on the idiotic.
"Prof. Peterson does not like to discuss primary literature* in his class"
Your justification for this is a Chronicle article that you apparently misunderstood. Here's the text with the word "primary": "He added readings from Symposium, he said, to include an older text in addition to more modern readings on race and gender. “Last time I relied entirely on the primary readings in the textbook, which I did not like.”
I don’t know what Peterson does, but your assumption that Aristophanes’ speech is garbage is itself dubious. You’ve misremembered who’s drunk, for one thing (Alcibiades). You’ve also forgotten that Aristophanes is the one guy Socrates is still talking with as the night winds down, which suggests he was worth talking to. Socrates’ own speech is presumably the closest to expressing Plato’s own view, but this doesn’t mean the others are crap. Socrates’ speech contains a myth, by the way.
The larger point is that we shouldn’t defend censorship by claiming that we are only banning bad readings of texts. Saying that Plato can only be taught one way isn’t any better than saying Plato can’t be taught.
My complaint is Lukianoff's disingenuous catastrophizing. Plato is not banned. *Symposium* is not contraband. This inaccurate and inflammatory language is unseemly. I read a couple of his books when they first came out—*Unlearning Liberty* (2014) and *The Coddling…* (2019)—and his writing always struck me as more measured.
On another note, Plato is an extraordinary writer. Every detail in the
dialogs is there for a reason.
In *The Clouds*, Aristophanes paints Socrates as a sophist, corrupting the youth of Athens. Ultimately, that image and charge is what got Socrates killed, which Plato is not pleased about. *Symposium* is the only dialog where Aristophanes has a speaking part. Plato wants to skewer him.
*Apology* paints poetic vulgarization of things (in this case, Aristophanes' portrayal of Socrates' search for truth) as misguided and dangerous. In *Symposium*, Aristophanes' poetic vulgarization of love as "desire of what I can get from you (namely, a spasmodic sensation of completeness)" contrasts sharply with Socrates' elevating description which immediately follows. Aristophanes can't control himself—overeats, over-drinks ("or something else"), hiccups, a perpetually renewed lust. He's the antithesis of Socrates. His physiological and psychological disorder are mirrored in the conceptual disorder of his account of love.
He attrubutes the cause of his hiccups to πλησμονή (repletion), which is not a neutral term. In medical and ethical contexts it is associated with lack of measure (akrasia, pleonexia). The hiccups are involuntary spasms brought on by lack of control. Eryximachos' “sneeze cure” replaces one type of spasm with another.
For Aristophanes, love is a another spasm, a compulsive drive to temporarily plug a felt lack. His poetic description of lust vulgarizes love rather than elevates it. The language is vivid, funny, and emotionally satisfying but metaphysically flattening. Love becomes the desire for completion through possession, culminating in the fantasy of permanent fusion (“if Hephaestus offered to weld us together…”).
This is exactly what Diotima (whom Socrates is voicing) later identifies as a confusion of the means with the end: clinging to bodies, relationships, or experiences rather than ascending toward the good itself.
The speech is not "garbage" (I'm pretty sure I never implied that it was). It does give a colorful rendition of Plato’s critique of poetic mimesis in general...especially in contrast to Socrates' elevated conception of love that immediately follows—not as desire for completion, but desire for the perpetual generation of the good in the beautiful. Not an endless cycle of spasm and release, but ordered ascent.
Peterson was told he could "mitigate" were he to "remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these." Unless that email was written poorly (which is of course possible) that means Peterson had to drop the modules *and* drop Plato passages that may raise issues of gender ideology. Aristophanes' speech clearly qualifies. We can agree to disagree about how to read Plato's Symposium (your reading above is serious and well-informed), but the essential point remains that Peterson was told he couldn't teach Aristophanes' speech.
Saying "Plato is banned" is an exaggeration inasmuch as one could presumably find plenty of passages in Plato that don't cross whatever lines Texas is enforcing. But the key point remains that Texas is censoring what faculty can teach, including what passages from Plato one can teach. That strikes me as catastrophic enough. "You can teach whatever Plato we say you can" is cold comfort.
On a "academic freedom" scale from 0 to 10, where 0 = "You will say only what we tell you to say" to 10 = "We will pay you to teach whatever you want, regardless of what it is," banning Plato would be about a 1, if not ε. But that is decidedly not what is happening in this case.
Defunding and deplatforming particular extremist ideologies? 5-9, depending on how sweeping your definition of "extremist" is and how vigorous the policing. My understanding is that TAMU doesn't want to support "gender ideology," and Mr. Peterson is testing the limits of that restriction. The limit is not Plato, nor Symposium, nor even carefully cherry-picked excerpts of Symposium, but cherry-picked excerpts that claim Plato as an ally in teaching "gender ideology."
I'll bet that Symposium—along with the "offending" passages, which, in the eyes of the regents, really aren't "offending" nor the issue—is still taught at TAMU in all other courses that want to teach it.
The issue isn't Plato but "gender ideology." TAMU finds it offensive enough that they forbid their employees to teach it without permission. That's the issue; it's an important one to think about and discuss. Mischaracterizing it as "banning Plato" or otherwise putting it on the 0 end of the scale above (e.g. "couldn't teach Aristophanes' speech" or "you can teach whatever Plato we say you can") shuts off discussion and turns it into strictly a power struggle.
I love reading Plato and have read nearly all his dialogs. I even learned Greek as an undergrad so I could read them in the original (but only made it through Ἀπολογία Σωκράτους and Φαίδων before getting sucked into STEM). I'd like to see more people read, study, and discuss Plato. It would be tragic if a university were to "ban Plato" or forbid certain dialogs (e.g. Symposium) or excerpts (Aristophanes' speech)…but that's not what's happening at TAMU.
Where I think we ought to be able to agree is that Texas A & M is forbidding any discussion of race and gender ideology. I don't know Peterson, but his syllabus (link below) looks pretty conventional to me, with familiar topics for debate; one week on abortion, one on race & gender, one on capital punishment, etc. At least taken at face value, he isn't promoting any position on any of those issues. His publishing looks quite conventional as well (link below). He's not a race and gender theorist or advocate of critical race theory or the like, as far as I can tell; he's a consequentialist with a particular interest in applied ethics (particularly to engineering). Saying that a course on "contemporary moral issues" can't teach what is obviously a major topic in contemporary moral debates would be a rather lower score than "5-9" on my scale (where lower numbers are more troubling). Banning *advocacy* of a particular race or gender ideology may be slightly less problematic, but one person's theory is another's ideology, and academic discourse is hard to pull off without theory. I'm sure we agree that certain racial theories shouldn't be advocated for in the classroom, like one that said one race was superior and another should be exterminated. But a theoretically informed approach to the impact of race or gender on our culture shouldn't be banned, at least in my opinion, and that seems to be what Texas A & M is doing (under pressure from the state). At any rate, *advocacy* doesn't seem to be the issue here; the issue here is mere *discussion* of what is obviously a major issue in contemporary moral debate in a class on contemporary moral issues. Instead Aggies are to pretend that there's no theoretically informed debate about race and gender, and kept from any texts that would lead them to think such a pernicious thought.
I agree with you to the extent that Plato is collateral damage, not the main target. I also suspect that you are right that Plato is being taught elsewhere on campus. If we take the email Peterson got literally, however, they wanted to ensure he removed those Symposium passages in any form, presumably out of a worry that passages from the Symposium that were relevant to gender would lead to a discussion that someone could categorize as "teaching gender ideology." He wasn't told that he could teach those passages so long as he didn't advocate for a particular gender ideology. He was simply told that he couldn't teach those passages. If A & M wanted to clarify this matter, they could have. Perhaps I've missed that, but I haven't seen it.
You have helped me think through these issues, even if we don't agree. That is precisely the sort of discussion of contemporary moral issues that I think Peterson is trying to protect. For now, it looks like he's having the last word by teaching this particular controversy, even if he can't teach about race and gender ideology. We can only hope that it doesn't occur to the Texas legislature to ban the teaching of academic freedom ideology.
…much appreciate the focus on the real issue and not the "ban Plato" diversion.
I don't know where I stand on this particular case because I don't know enough about it.
On that 0-10 scale, I'd put my attitude at 8 or 9…academic freedom is essential but so is institutional discretion—employing and amplifying whom they want and having discretion over the direction they go in. No solutions; only trade-offs.
Seems to me that after reading a bunch of the other dialogues, one would see neither Republic nor Laws as Plato’s literal views.
A&M messed up in censoring by viewpoint, whereas I continue to believe it is ok for larger administrative and legislative bodies to determine the content taught by subsidiary ones; academic freedom is primarily institutional.
A content restriction applies to the module as much as the particular readings the professor is using to treat the topic. So if the prohibition were against teaching myths in science class and the module was about myths and the reading was Plato about Atlantis, same result.
Excellent. Misoponos would love your catastrophizing!
Plato hated Aristophanes and painted him as a fool in Symposium—drunk off his rocker and spouting ridiculous "myths" to avoid real arguments and discussion. Plato was skewering Aristophanes to highlight the absurdity of superficial mimesis as a cheap substitute for reason and explanation.
Prof. Peterson does not like to discuss primary literature* in his class, presumably because it encourages students to wrestle with difficult material themselves without the careful curation and filtering by the priestly Professor. In this case, a few select quotes are lifted from Plato's caricature of Aristophanes in order to disingenuously paint Plato as a "gender ideology" compatriot.
Texas A&M fell for Peterson's trap, ordering him not to intentionally and superficially distort Plato to further a political agenda. The dishonest press OF COURSE would add their own distortions in the form of catastrophizing exaggerations: "Texas A&M Bans Plato" or "the thing being treated as contraband here is Plato’s Symposium."
No. Plato is not being banned, nor is Symposium. Instead, the target is a sloppy and disingenuous use of completely out-of-context excerpt to twist Plato into some kind of "gender ideology" trailblazer and advocate. Sure, Texas A&M's "ban" on teaching "gender ideology" probably crosses the line into idiotic, but a response that bends the knee to Misoponos by catastrophizing the episode into a black and white battle between the Good People and the Evil People also borders on the idiotic.
Excellent coup, Prof. Peterson.
And Lukianoff, you've been played like a fiddle.
----------
* https://www.chronicle.com/article/texas-a-m-bans-plato-excerpt-from-a-philosophy-course
"Prof. Peterson does not like to discuss primary literature* in his class"
Your justification for this is a Chronicle article that you apparently misunderstood. Here's the text with the word "primary": "He added readings from Symposium, he said, to include an older text in addition to more modern readings on race and gender. “Last time I relied entirely on the primary readings in the textbook, which I did not like.”
I don’t know what Peterson does, but your assumption that Aristophanes’ speech is garbage is itself dubious. You’ve misremembered who’s drunk, for one thing (Alcibiades). You’ve also forgotten that Aristophanes is the one guy Socrates is still talking with as the night winds down, which suggests he was worth talking to. Socrates’ own speech is presumably the closest to expressing Plato’s own view, but this doesn’t mean the others are crap. Socrates’ speech contains a myth, by the way.
The larger point is that we shouldn’t defend censorship by claiming that we are only banning bad readings of texts. Saying that Plato can only be taught one way isn’t any better than saying Plato can’t be taught.
My complaint is Lukianoff's disingenuous catastrophizing. Plato is not banned. *Symposium* is not contraband. This inaccurate and inflammatory language is unseemly. I read a couple of his books when they first came out—*Unlearning Liberty* (2014) and *The Coddling…* (2019)—and his writing always struck me as more measured.
On another note, Plato is an extraordinary writer. Every detail in the
dialogs is there for a reason.
In *The Clouds*, Aristophanes paints Socrates as a sophist, corrupting the youth of Athens. Ultimately, that image and charge is what got Socrates killed, which Plato is not pleased about. *Symposium* is the only dialog where Aristophanes has a speaking part. Plato wants to skewer him.
*Apology* paints poetic vulgarization of things (in this case, Aristophanes' portrayal of Socrates' search for truth) as misguided and dangerous. In *Symposium*, Aristophanes' poetic vulgarization of love as "desire of what I can get from you (namely, a spasmodic sensation of completeness)" contrasts sharply with Socrates' elevating description which immediately follows. Aristophanes can't control himself—overeats, over-drinks ("or something else"), hiccups, a perpetually renewed lust. He's the antithesis of Socrates. His physiological and psychological disorder are mirrored in the conceptual disorder of his account of love.
He attrubutes the cause of his hiccups to πλησμονή (repletion), which is not a neutral term. In medical and ethical contexts it is associated with lack of measure (akrasia, pleonexia). The hiccups are involuntary spasms brought on by lack of control. Eryximachos' “sneeze cure” replaces one type of spasm with another.
For Aristophanes, love is a another spasm, a compulsive drive to temporarily plug a felt lack. His poetic description of lust vulgarizes love rather than elevates it. The language is vivid, funny, and emotionally satisfying but metaphysically flattening. Love becomes the desire for completion through possession, culminating in the fantasy of permanent fusion (“if Hephaestus offered to weld us together…”).
This is exactly what Diotima (whom Socrates is voicing) later identifies as a confusion of the means with the end: clinging to bodies, relationships, or experiences rather than ascending toward the good itself.
The speech is not "garbage" (I'm pretty sure I never implied that it was). It does give a colorful rendition of Plato’s critique of poetic mimesis in general...especially in contrast to Socrates' elevated conception of love that immediately follows—not as desire for completion, but desire for the perpetual generation of the good in the beautiful. Not an endless cycle of spasm and release, but ordered ascent.
Peterson was told he could "mitigate" were he to "remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these." Unless that email was written poorly (which is of course possible) that means Peterson had to drop the modules *and* drop Plato passages that may raise issues of gender ideology. Aristophanes' speech clearly qualifies. We can agree to disagree about how to read Plato's Symposium (your reading above is serious and well-informed), but the essential point remains that Peterson was told he couldn't teach Aristophanes' speech.
Saying "Plato is banned" is an exaggeration inasmuch as one could presumably find plenty of passages in Plato that don't cross whatever lines Texas is enforcing. But the key point remains that Texas is censoring what faculty can teach, including what passages from Plato one can teach. That strikes me as catastrophic enough. "You can teach whatever Plato we say you can" is cold comfort.
On a "academic freedom" scale from 0 to 10, where 0 = "You will say only what we tell you to say" to 10 = "We will pay you to teach whatever you want, regardless of what it is," banning Plato would be about a 1, if not ε. But that is decidedly not what is happening in this case.
Defunding and deplatforming particular extremist ideologies? 5-9, depending on how sweeping your definition of "extremist" is and how vigorous the policing. My understanding is that TAMU doesn't want to support "gender ideology," and Mr. Peterson is testing the limits of that restriction. The limit is not Plato, nor Symposium, nor even carefully cherry-picked excerpts of Symposium, but cherry-picked excerpts that claim Plato as an ally in teaching "gender ideology."
I'll bet that Symposium—along with the "offending" passages, which, in the eyes of the regents, really aren't "offending" nor the issue—is still taught at TAMU in all other courses that want to teach it.
The issue isn't Plato but "gender ideology." TAMU finds it offensive enough that they forbid their employees to teach it without permission. That's the issue; it's an important one to think about and discuss. Mischaracterizing it as "banning Plato" or otherwise putting it on the 0 end of the scale above (e.g. "couldn't teach Aristophanes' speech" or "you can teach whatever Plato we say you can") shuts off discussion and turns it into strictly a power struggle.
I love reading Plato and have read nearly all his dialogs. I even learned Greek as an undergrad so I could read them in the original (but only made it through Ἀπολογία Σωκράτους and Φαίδων before getting sucked into STEM). I'd like to see more people read, study, and discuss Plato. It would be tragic if a university were to "ban Plato" or forbid certain dialogs (e.g. Symposium) or excerpts (Aristophanes' speech)…but that's not what's happening at TAMU.
Where I think we ought to be able to agree is that Texas A & M is forbidding any discussion of race and gender ideology. I don't know Peterson, but his syllabus (link below) looks pretty conventional to me, with familiar topics for debate; one week on abortion, one on race & gender, one on capital punishment, etc. At least taken at face value, he isn't promoting any position on any of those issues. His publishing looks quite conventional as well (link below). He's not a race and gender theorist or advocate of critical race theory or the like, as far as I can tell; he's a consequentialist with a particular interest in applied ethics (particularly to engineering). Saying that a course on "contemporary moral issues" can't teach what is obviously a major topic in contemporary moral debates would be a rather lower score than "5-9" on my scale (where lower numbers are more troubling). Banning *advocacy* of a particular race or gender ideology may be slightly less problematic, but one person's theory is another's ideology, and academic discourse is hard to pull off without theory. I'm sure we agree that certain racial theories shouldn't be advocated for in the classroom, like one that said one race was superior and another should be exterminated. But a theoretically informed approach to the impact of race or gender on our culture shouldn't be banned, at least in my opinion, and that seems to be what Texas A & M is doing (under pressure from the state). At any rate, *advocacy* doesn't seem to be the issue here; the issue here is mere *discussion* of what is obviously a major issue in contemporary moral debate in a class on contemporary moral issues. Instead Aggies are to pretend that there's no theoretically informed debate about race and gender, and kept from any texts that would lead them to think such a pernicious thought.
I agree with you to the extent that Plato is collateral damage, not the main target. I also suspect that you are right that Plato is being taught elsewhere on campus. If we take the email Peterson got literally, however, they wanted to ensure he removed those Symposium passages in any form, presumably out of a worry that passages from the Symposium that were relevant to gender would lead to a discussion that someone could categorize as "teaching gender ideology." He wasn't told that he could teach those passages so long as he didn't advocate for a particular gender ideology. He was simply told that he couldn't teach those passages. If A & M wanted to clarify this matter, they could have. Perhaps I've missed that, but I haven't seen it.
You have helped me think through these issues, even if we don't agree. That is precisely the sort of discussion of contemporary moral issues that I think Peterson is trying to protect. For now, it looks like he's having the last word by teaching this particular controversy, even if he can't teach about race and gender ideology. We can only hope that it doesn't occur to the Texas legislature to ban the teaching of academic freedom ideology.
His syllabus, with changes:
https://leiterreports.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Syllabus-PHIL-111-S-2026-_-Peterson_censored.pdf
His homepage:
https://www.martinpeterson.org
…much appreciate the focus on the real issue and not the "ban Plato" diversion.
I don't know where I stand on this particular case because I don't know enough about it.
On that 0-10 scale, I'd put my attitude at 8 or 9…academic freedom is essential but so is institutional discretion—employing and amplifying whom they want and having discretion over the direction they go in. No solutions; only trade-offs.
Seems to me that after reading a bunch of the other dialogues, one would see neither Republic nor Laws as Plato’s literal views.
A&M messed up in censoring by viewpoint, whereas I continue to believe it is ok for larger administrative and legislative bodies to determine the content taught by subsidiary ones; academic freedom is primarily institutional.
A content restriction applies to the module as much as the particular readings the professor is using to treat the topic. So if the prohibition were against teaching myths in science class and the module was about myths and the reading was Plato about Atlantis, same result.
The Form of th Dumb! Brilliant!
Form of the Dumb. Forum of the Dumb. All disastrous.